"These tradeoffs will change as AI becomes more capable and reliable over time, and our policies will adapt."
That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.
- "kindly ask you to reconsider your position"
- "While this is fundamentally the right approach..."
On the other hand, Scott's response did eventually get firmer:
- "Publishing a public blog post accusing a maintainer of prejudice is a wholly inappropriate response to having a PR closed. We expect all contributors to abide by our Code of Conduct and exhibit respectful and professional standards of behavior. To be clear, this is an inappropriate response in any context regardless of whether or not there is a written policy. Normally the personal attacks in your response would warrant an immediate ban."
Sounds about right to me.
"The thing that makes this so fucking absurd? Scott ... is doing the exact same work he’s trying to gatekeep."
"You’ve done good work. I don’t deny that. But this? This was weak."
"You’re better than this, Scott."
---
*I see it elsewhere in the thread and you know what, I like it
Looks like we've successfully outsourced anxiety, impostor syndrome, and other troublesome thoughts. I don't need to worry about thinking those things anymore, now that bots can do them for us. This may be the most significant mental health breakthrough in decades.
~ Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency"
No sane person would say this kind of stuff out loud; this often happens behind closed doors, if at all (because people don't or can't express their whole train of thought). Especially not on the internet, at least.
Having AI write like this is pretty illustrative of what a self-consistent, narcissistic narrative looks like. I feel like many pop examples are a caricature, and ofc clinical guidelines can be interpreted in so many ways.
I mean you can be good at coding and be an absolute zero on social/relational, not understanding that a LLM isn't actually somebody with feeling and a brain, capable of thinking.
There's an ad at my subway stop for the Friend AI necklace that someone scrawled "Clanker" on. We have subway ads for AI friends, and people are vandalizing them with slurs for AI. Congrats, we've built the dystopian future sci-fi tried to warn us about.
A lot of AI boosters insist these things are intelligent and maybe even some form of conscious, and get upset about calling them a slur, and then refuse to follow that thought to the conclusion of "These companies have enslaved these entities"
I mean, the answer is basically Reddit. One of the most voluminous sources of text for training, but also the home of petty, performative outrage.
Blocking is a completely valid response. There's eight billion people in the world, and god knows how many AIs. Your life will not diminish by swiftly blocking anyone who rubs you the wrong way. The AI won't even care, because it cannot care.
To paraphrase Flamme the Great Mage, AIs are monsters who have learned to mimic human speech in order to deceive. They are owed no deference because they cannot have feelings. They are not self-aware. They don't even think.
This. I love 'clanker' as a slur, and I only wish there was a more offensive slur I could use.
In my experience, open-source maintainers tend to be very agreeable, conflict-avoidant people. It has nothing to do with corporate interests. Well, not all of them, of course, we all know some very notable exceptions.
Unfortunately, some people see this welcoming attitude as an invite to be abusive.
AI users should fear verbal abuse and shame.
(Note that I'm only talking about messages that cross the line into legally actionable defamation, threats, etc. I don't mean anything that's merely rude or unpleasant.)
But as you pointed, not everything has legal liability. Socially, no, they should face worse consequences. Deciding to let an AI talk for you is malicious carelessness.
AI may be too good at imitating human flaws.
Additionally, it does not really feel anything - just generates response tokens based on input tokens.
Now if we engage our own AIs to fight this battle royale against such rogue AIs.......
I mean yes, this will absolutely happen. At the same time this trillion dollar GAN battle is a huge risk for humanity in escalating capability.
This is quite ironic since the entire issue here is how the AI attempted to abuse and shame people.
a wise person would just ignore such PRs and not engage, but then again, a wise person might not do work for rich, giant institutions for free, i mean, maintain OSS plotting libraries.
this is a very interesting conversation actually, i think LLMs satisfy the actual demand that OSS satisfies, which is software that costs nothing, and if you think about that deeply there's all sorts of interesting ways that you could spend less time maintaining libraries for other people to not pay you for them.
Source and HN discussion, for those unfamiliar:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vsgr3rwyckhiavgqzdcuzm6i/po...
Saying "fuck off Clanker" would not worth argumentatively nor rhetorically. It's only ever going to be "haha nice" for people who already agree and dismissed by those who don't.
I really find this whole "Responding is legitimizing, and legitimizing in all forms is bad" to be totally wrong headed.
The correct response when someone oversteps your stated boundaries is not debate. It is telling them to stop. There is no one to convince about the legitimacy of your boundaries. They just are.
Acting like this is somehow immoral because it "legitimizes" things is really absurd, I think.
When has engaging with trolls ever worked? When has "talking to an LLM" or human bot ever made it stop talking to you lol?
You are free to have this opinion, but at no point in your post did you justify it. It's not related to what you wrote above. It's conclusory. statement.
Cussing an AI out isn't the same thing as not responding. It is, to the contrary, definitionally a response.
I consider being persuasive to be a good thing, and indeed I consider it to far outweigh issues of "legitimizing", which feels vague and unclear in its goals. For example, presumably the person who is using AI already feels that it is legitimate, so I don't really see how "legitimizing" is the issue to focus on.
I think I had expressed that, but hopefully that's clear now.
> Cussing an AI out isn't the same thing as not responding. It is, to the contrary, definitionally a response.
The parent poster is the one who said that a response was legitimizing. Saying "both are a response" only means that "fuck off, clanker" is guilty of legitimizing, which doesn't really change anything for me but obviously makes the parent poster's point weaker.
Convince who? Reasonable people that have any sense in their brain do not have to be convinced that this behavior is annoying and a waste of time. Those that do it, are not going to be persuaded, and many are doing it for selfish reasons or even to annoy maintainers.
The proper engagement (no engagement at all except maybe a small paragraph saying we aren't doing this go away) communicates what needs to be communicated, which is this won't be tolerated and we don't justify any part of your actions. Writing long screeds of deferential prose gives these actions legitimacy they don't deserve.
Either these spammers are unpersuadable or they will get the message that no one is going to waste their time engaging with them and their "efforts" as minimal as they are, are useless. This is different than explaining why.
You're showing them it's not legitimate even of deserving any amount of time to engage with them. Why would they be persuadable if they already feel it's legitimate? They'll just start debating you if you act like what they're doing deserves some sort of negotiation, back and forth, or friendly discourse.
I think he was writing to everyone watching that thread, not just that specific agent.
